You know civilzation is going to pot when …
January 27, 2007 · By George Freeman
A common enough occurrence given the mass of gutless irresponsible parents today; the pitfalls of when we no longer expect parents to take charge of their children or face the consequences themselves.
ORLANDO, Fla. - AirTran Airways on Tuesday defended its decision to remove a Massachusetts couple from a flight after their crying 3-year-old daughter refused to take her seat before takeoff. …
“The flight was already delayed 15 minutes and in fairness to the other 112 passengers on the plane, the crew made an operational decision to remove the family,” AirTran spokeswoman Judy Graham-Weaver said.
Horror of horrors! What a terrible thing to do to a young family that finds 15 minutes PAST takeoff time just too imposing.
Julie and Gerry Kulesza [notice the wife's name is given first], who were headed home to Boston on Jan. 14 from Fort Myers, said they just needed a little more time to calm their daughter, Elly.
“We weren’t given an opportunity to hold her, console her or anything,” Julie Kulesza said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
The Kuleszas said they told a flight attendant they had paid for their daughter’s seat, but asked whether she could sit in her mother’s lap. The request was denied. [because it is contrary to the law]
She was removed because “she was climbing under the seat and hitting the parents and wouldn’t get in her seat” during boarding, Graham-Weaver said.
Apparently 15 minutes just isn’t enough time to calm and console a child into submission, telling her how much she is loved whilst she flays about under a seat accosting her parents.
And for his immasculating lack of fatherly interest [Why can't his kind be sterile?], Mr. Kulesza declairs: “his family would never fly AirTran again.”
This, even after:
The Orlando-based carrier reimbursed the family $595.80, the cost of the three tickets, and the Kuleszas flew home the next day.
They also were offered three roundtrip tickets anywhere the airline flies, Graham-Weaver said.
Too bad the airline aloud itself to be bullied by spineless parents, victims of both their children and planes full of people with schedules to keep.
Oh now you’ve done it all parents are going to let their kids be monsters so they can get free tickets.
My family flew into Vancouver at Christmas a few years ago, my kids were 4 and 2, we were stranded there for hours because of a freak snow storm. Not a peep out of my little ones. Bad parents make for bad kids.
There were never unruly kids back in the good old days, that’s for sure. Smack ‘em across the cheek a few times and they’d start calling from the play sheet pretty quick.
Exactly!
A tantrum isn’t always a sign of bad parenting. My kid has autism. She has tantrums, and you simply cannot reason with her. We didn’t know she had an autistic spectrum disorder until she was 3 1/2. I could see my daughter not wanting to sit in her seat and not being able to be bribed into it. There’s just reasoning with her. If they couldn’t bribe her or find enough incentive to make her sit, then there could be a deeper problem.
Maybe next time they should give her a dose of Gravol. That puts my daughter right to sleep (and for the record, I only use it for long car rides– not discipline! But it’s tempting!).
Point taken Suzanne.
I’m not telling people how to discipline their children, although I do think there are times when physical coercion may be necessary.
That said, what annoys me most about this story is the utter failure of the parents in question to take responsibility for their child. They must have spent upwards of half an hour trying to settle that child! And whatever they were doing wasn’t working!
Given that the plane could not takeoff until the child was seated and secure, they were holding up 112 other people who had all paid to depart at a certain time. When they were asked to leave, 15 minutes past takeoff time (considering they must have been there for a while before that), the parents should have recognized that the misbehaviour of their child had cost them all their flight and accepted responsibility for it. Instead they whine about being kicked of the aircraft by a cold hearted airline with whom “they will never fly with again.” And this after the airline reimbursed them and gave them three round trip tickets.
The parents were not owed anything by the airline! Clearly they and their child were not capable of being given the service for which they paid. Clearly this was posing a hardship to the airline and its 112 other passengers. Clearly the parents were responsible for the 3 year old regardless of how they were trying to get control of the situation; whatever it was wasn’t working.
The gracious party here was the airline, not the weaselly irresponsible parents.
Don’t forget, had they dared to raise a hand to their child they would have been arrested for assault and had their child seized by social services.
I think they should get free tickets - maybe this kind of thing will wake up people and get them to stand up to the idiot bleeding hearts who would ban spanking.
This could have been over in about 30 seconds had society not decided that parents are no longer allowed to discipline their child.
Agree with the posting, kid was brat, airline was right, etc. but wanted to point one thing out since you make note of the fact that the wife’s name is mentioned first … when writing the name of a married couple, etiquette dictates that the woman’s name is always first because a man’s first and last name should never be separated since he was born with that name and she married in to it. That’s my etiquette lesson of the day.